Feeling Good About Being Stupid

I wish I had some people's tolerance for their own ignorance:

Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying...Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant.

Aside from the isolating nature of graduate school, constantly feeling stupid is probably the hardest thing to adapt to. I still haven't found a good way to focus in the face of infinite possibilities.

Oh, right, I read reddit to help me focus. Nevermind.

Graduate School Abroad? There is a student loan tax...

Hop on over to the FAFSA website of school codes at:

http://www.fafsa.ed.gov/FOTWWebApp/FSLookupServlet

and try running a search for *any* foreign school. Notice something odd? Lots of prestigious foreign institutions aren't listed: University of Kyoto, EPFL, TU Delft.

If you have undergraduate loans left and decide to return to grad schools, you cannot defer this loans for most overseas institutions. For every 1,000 you have at 5%, you're losing about $180 if you decide to go overseas. Have $20,000 in loans? You're looking at $3,600 of additional debt because you decided to go overseas. Note that you are losing roughly this same amount of money if you don't appropriately defer your loans upon returning to graduate school.

I'll save why I think the US DOE decides against appropriately accrediting overseas institutions for a later post.